Beta signups open today through Steam.

Valve has officially announced the beta release of its Source Filmmaker, a free tool that lets users create animated movies using assets from Team Fortress 2. The company notes that all its own video shorts are made with the tool, and its release will allow others to create animation with "the rendering power of a modern gaming PC."

The announcement is accompanied by a demo video that shows some of the flexibility of SFM. Users can work with or modify pre-animated clips, or create animations of their own using a separate tool to work the joints and limbs of characters.

The voiceover points out that the tool allows animators to pause the videos they create, implement changes in the 3D frame, and then start the animation again, without having to re-render the scene. Reduction of rendering time has been cited as a major advantage of Unreal Engine 4, so its use in a consumer-level industry tool is very impressive. Of course, SFM has a much smaller toolset to draw from—most, if not all, of the characters in the demo video are of the square-jawed TF2 variety. This is not Valve's first time sharing animation tools, either; earlier in June, the company announced it was sharing its Source engine to power an upcoming 3D animated film, Deep.

The beta signup opens today, and requires a Steam account. Once you click the button on SFM's site, Steam will perform a check on the specs of your system, so make sure you request from your finest rig.

Promoted Comments

Don't understand the appeal of using pre-made characters unless your story doesn't need to take character design, modeling style, textures or personality into account (in which case..eh). Step in the right direction though.

Machinema is a pretty big genre and a lot of people spend hours and hours "filming" short clips that they then spend hours and hours later stringing together into a 5 minute video.

But I saw nothing in the announcement or video that definitively said "you can't use your own assets". It sounds to me like it's using the Source engine to power the real time rendering, lighting, effects, etc. But once it's out of beta, I'd be surprised if they don't have a way to import your own models and textures. Sure, it's not going to be ultra-high quality, millions of polys / character, Pixar-esque masterpieces, but most people that just want to play around with animation don't want that anyway (particularly the time involved rendering those types of projects out).

I can see this going over very well with the Blender community who will probably be the first to add the ability to save directly from Blender into whatever format SFM uses natively. Models, textures, bones, skin weighting, wrap coordinates & polygon/edge/face/vertex normals, etc.

Blender already has a built in animation component, but it's not geared for real-time rendering/playback (nor should it be), and that's where SFM is going to really shine. You get to put your video together, change it up on the fly and see exactly what it's going to look like in real time, and then when you're ready to share it YouTube or whatever, render it out to a video. It's brilliant for marketing campaigns, storyboarding, pre-vis, reenactments, etc.

3612 posts | registered Jun 19, 2006

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston